Preface

I’ve been working in SharePoint consulting for over 10 years, and with time I began to realize the lack of books on the market that showed tech-savvy business users just how easy SharePoint is to use. I would go in and build systems for major corporations and government agencies around the world, and in most cases toward the end of the engagement there would still be some hours remaining because I had completed the job ahead of schedule. I often would use this time to meet with the business owners and educate them on how to use the new system. I would listen to what their pain points were and make suggestions on how they could leverage SharePoint to help manage and automate their business needs. The reaction from this was amazing: clients would tell me that they had paid companies a significant amount of money in the past to implement similar solutions; they had no idea how easy it was to do this leveraging SharePoint functionality. This is what prompted me to write a book and to make it scenario-based.

You’ll find many technical books on SharePoint that discuss how to build out the infrastructure or do development with SharePoint, and you may find a few step-by-step books on SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality. What’s unique about this book is that it teaches you this functionality in a scenario format. I chose to use that format to ensure that you exercise your imagination to realize the many options for using SharePoint’s built-in functionality.